I love how clueless people think that just because they want something, Linode not only has to provide it, but has to be able to make a business case and profit from their half assed scheme.

Feel free TeshooLama to colocate a few dozen boxes, divvy them up into whatever size you think people just have to have, charge next to nothing, and see how long you stay in business.

Besides the simple accounting overhead of billing peanuts per month, there's the real overhead of maintaining the servers, the VM setup, and the networking infrastructure.

Good luck doing all that when you're billing out at $5-10 per month per whiny user, because it never fails that the cheapass customers always take way more support then the middle and upper customers.

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Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

Could you elaborate a little bit on this? I am the "cheapass" customer of Linode (was having one 512 MB, now one 1024 MB Linode) and I rarely have to hit up the support. Hence I can't see a correlation between the Linode size and frequency of hitting up tech support.

There are a few people who toy with FreeBSD on Linodes, but it's never really been a reliable option. Usually when people do try it they report that they got it working, but have lots of ongoing issues and instability. Perhaps these issues no longer occur, it's been a while since anybody has reported back on trying.

TeshooLama: I wasn't trolling, or being rude (as you are), or being arrogant (as you are), or any of those things. I'm being upfront. Your client has unreasonable requirements, and my point is that your messages imply that Linode has somehow become a worse value by giving everybody free upgrades at the same price. But that's the price is the same. They didn't discontinue anything, they upgraded all their plans. It's still the same plan, it just comes with more RAM.

I don't really understand your hostility. You come here making unreasonable demands in a community support forum and then get all huffy when people tell you that your demands are unreasonable. What more do you want from us?

Low-budget offerings tend to attract people who don't know what they're doing. Take, for instance, all the people here now complaining that their formerly-512MB-now-1GB nodes setup as web servers with stock configs of httpd, PHP, MySQL, and who-know-what-else can't handle more than 5-6 simultaneous connections without locking up and/or crashing due to an OOM condition. They ask for a ridiculous amount of support time and complain the whole time that their $4/month shared hosting worked just fine.

I'd love to see smaller, cheaper nodes at the $5-10/month point, maybe 512MB RAM, 10GB of space, two CPU cores, etc. sold as an ADD-ON for existing customers. Something you can use to spin off a memcached node, DNS server, load balancer, etc. Not something you try and run Plesk or, <shudder>CPanel</shudder> on. I'm not going to lose any sleep over the lack of that offering though.

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Jason Litka
Utter Ramblings

You guys are all missing the OP's point. It's not about offering cheaper plans, ie. 512 nodes for ten bucks, but offering 2 x 512 combos for $20 minimum.

So you get one 512 and you pay $20. You get another, your invoice does not change. You get another, it climbs up to $40....

Old hardware gets reused, $$/mo/customer remains the same, more is sold because more customers would want X 512s instead of X/2 1024s.

No, I was not missing anything. I understand what he wants. A special plan. My point to him is that if Linode honored requests like that then they would have others asking for more. And what happens with the current 1024 plan becomes a 2048 and there is nothing under that offered. Does his deal then become 4x 512MB plans for $20? If they just double it to 2x 1GB plans for $20 then you have the same situation. Well, can't I just get 4x 512 MB plans instead for $20? It will never end.

DrJ: Please refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

In one hand, you're right. And one more reason why such subdivision would not be welcome, is shortage of the IPv4 space, unless you wish to start offering IPv6 only and/or LAN-only plans.

On the other hand, Linode is being marketed as a $0.65/day cloud, and IMHO a cloud should be flexible in both ways, esp. since with the powerful Linode API you can make your own, highly-scalable and automated cloud. So the only bottom line here is the premise that Linode does not wish to offer customer support for less than $20/mo, and they can keep that bottom line with a special plan like 2x512 nodes for $20/mo.

512MB is a reasonable minimum, where 256 or less probably isn't. So yes, even if one day 1GB becomes 2GB, this system can still have its merits. Doable, possible, automated, the only question is whether Linode is willing to do it, and whether there is any interest at all.

Whoa, just learned about the free upgrade when I read this thread. Very nice--thanks Linode!

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Amateur, eager to learn.
My hematology, oncology, and chemotherapy regimen wiki

Yeah, computing technology has been like that, a never ending series of improvements. Its likely to continue for a while longer too. Companies that don't deal with it often end up finding themselves chewed up from below. Before there was VPS hosting, there was shared hosting, dedicated hosting, and colocation. Linode and other VPS and cloud providers have ended up eating into the market (or at least the growth) of dedicated hosting, shared hosting and colocation providers (while also being a customer of colo providers).

I understand the practicalities of maintaining a $20/month minimum, it seems the OP does as well. The fact that there is ongoing demand for cheaper plans is pretty good evidence that Linode is leaving room for upstarts to come along and disrupt their business. Offering a 2x512 for $20 plan wouldn't satisfy everyone, but it would allow Linode to hold the line on their price-points while also satisfying sophisticated customers who like the elegance of having a separation of concerns and abhore the inelegance of having severely over-speced servers.

I for one am delighted to have more RAM and cores at the same price-point, but honestly, I can't imagine what I'll do with it. I've bumped up the # of Apache processes. I might tweak mySQL. The disk cache will eat the rest, but very little data is "hot" or even warm. If I instead had the option of 2x512MB, I might start experimenting with load-balancing and failover and that could lead me to want and pay for more resources in the future. As it is, there is no temptation. The extra capacity is ultimately going to go pretty much unnoticed.

And therein lies the risk. I have two linodes that were just fine as 512's. If linode offered 2x512 for $20, I'd drop my two down to that and pay $20 instead of $40 a month